7/01/2014

White House press secretary Josh Earnest: "Well, as the constitutional lawyer who sits in the Oval Office would tell you is, he would read the entire decision before he passed judgment in terms of his own legal analysis. What we have been able to assess so far ... is that there is a problem that has been exposed, which is that there are now a group of women of an indeterminate size who no longer have access to free contraceptive coverage simply because of some religious views held, not by them necessarily, but by their bosses. We disagree and the constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office disagrees with that conclusion from the Supreme Court. And that's why we--primarily, because he is concerned about the impact it could have on the health of those women."

The notion that "contraceptive coverage" is free is absurd. If an insurance company completely covers 100% of the cost of RU-486 or other contraceptives, that costs the insurance company something and means that the premium is going to have to be higher. Even worse, Obamacare forces up the premiums for younger people (those who are obviously most likely to use contraceptives) relative to older ones. If Obama was concerned about the relatively small costs of contraceptives, why doesn't he first not raise young people's premiums so dramatically? This is the reason that Obamacare needs a lot of young people signing up to keep the premiums down, they cross subsidize the others getting insurance.